I’m Calling It: The Death of Politics in America

Obviously, this blog is pretty much dead.

I've been trying to find the desire to write a “closing” post for a long time now, but even just doing that felt exhausting.  But today, I found the article below, which pretty much sums up everything I've been meaning to write.

American Politics: Why the Thrill Is Gone - The New Yorker:

It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn't seem like fun to me. Watching Marco Rubio try to overcome his past support for immigration reform to win enough conservative votes to become the Mainstream Alternative to the Invisible Primary Leader—who, if there is one, will be a candidate named Bush—doesn't seem like fun. Nor does analyzing whether Chris Christie can become something more than the Factional Favorite of moderate Republicans, or whether Ted Cruz’s impressive early fundraising will make him that rare thing, a Factional Favorite with an outside chance to win. If this is any kind of fun, it’s the kind of fun I associate with reading about seventeenth-century French execution methods, or watching a YouTube video of a fight between a python and an alligator. Fun in small doses, as long as you’re not too close.

Is this a permanent shut down?  Who knows?  In 2012, this blog had a brief burst of life with that year’s presidential election, it is always possible that the same could happen again. 

However, the fact that I wrote just about everything there is to say about 2016 back in March of 2012 (Putin, Clinton, & Bush… Oh my! The current, dynastic period of American history), I see little hope that the upcoming elections are going to be nothing more than another agonizing shit fest of incompetent journalism, blazing lies fueled by bonfires of corporate cash, voters too ill informed, mostly through no fault of their own, to make competent decisions, and everything else that has come to signal the death of any true democratic spirit in America.

Beyond the presidency, things are even worse.

We can call it gridlock in Congress, but that is not what it is.  More and more I see this as being a sign of the increasing irrelevance of our republic’s institutions.  The partisan stonewalling may seem like political maneuvering to those involved, but all it has really done is remove an entire branch of government from any practical leadership role in our country.  

And the Supreme Court?  Man…  At best, hanging on by a thread.  At worst?  Not representing the interests of the Constitution any more, and one bad nomination away from eliminating any debate on the point.

The republic is over, democracy is dead…  Let the oligarchy reign!

UPDATE: 4/24/15

I will still be posting to the Facebook page, but not as often and I'm going to try to keep it to more focused on thoughtful, relevant articles with some depth and less on silly memes that are little more than red meat for the like-minded masses.

Biased political satire...Why There's No Conservative Jon Stewart - The Atlantic: "A unified theory of why political satire is biased toward, and talk radio is biased against, liberals in America."

This article is pretty stupid, really, overthiniking these topics by several degrees.  Really, shows like The Daily Show, while they do draw a more liberal than conservative viewership, are not "liberal" shows, and they go after the inanity of both parties with equal glee.  However, these days, the right is just producing a lot more facepalm moments.

If the right wants their own satire, it is already present in these shows.  Their politicians just need to clean up their acts a bit and quit saying and doing so many stupid things.  Not their policies, but rather how they campaign and lobby to advance them.  Then the jokes will be distributed more equally between the left and the right...

This is why the right wing attempts at these shows fail, because they put the politics ahead of the inanity of the situations being mocked, where the so-called "liberal" shows just mock first and never really worry about where their jokes are landing on the political scale.

As for talk radio, there may be more to this.  I think liberal do tend to get tired of the format and would rather have more factual reporting a la NPR than hours of discussion around facts that devolve into nothing more than meaningless partisan spin.

But another factor to consider on that front is that, for decades now, talk radio has been used as a major means of message delivery for the right, and has tremendous fininacial support from the right, while the rich and powerful on the left pretty much left Air America to wither and die.

Fox News, while successful in the ratings now, never would have made it if it were not for Murdoch's money and his ability to attach the network to the very established Fox name.

Why There's No Conservative Jon Stewart - The Atlantic: "A unified theory of why political satire is biased toward, and talk radio is biased against, liberals in America."